by Kate Cavanaugh
Image: “look up” by Abbie Doll
Wyatt didn’t hate Panera because of the food. Wyatt hated Panera because they only went there on errand days, and when they got home from errand days, his mom would pour tequila in the Fort Lauderdale shot glass painted with little pink flamingos and blare video after video on YouTube from her laptop. Power grid failure, chaos, collapse. How to be ready for those things when no one comes to help.
Wyatt listened at the top of the stairs until he nodded off, head pressed against the railing. Plump flamingos danced on the inside of his eyelids, growing fatter and fatter until they exploded one by one like pink fireworks. His mom wasn’t strict about bedtime, never had been, but he didn’t want to see her in that state, eyes wide behind her jelly-frame glasses, dark brown hair spiked in weird places from running her hands through it. That’s why, whenever the sound of her footsteps jerked Wyatt awake on the carpeted landing, he raced back to his bed to beat his mom to hers. Lying there, very still, he heard his own heartbeat thumping in the feathers of his pillow.
***
After Wyatt’s mom freaked out at a school board meeting about vaccines, Aurora wasn’t allowed to come over anymore. Her dad sat on the school board and knew everyone in town: the police chief, city council members, and the owner of the most popular Italian restaurant on Main Street. Wyatt tried to explain to Aurora where his mom was coming from, that the government had way too much control over its people, and that after Wyatt got his last vaccine, he had this really scary heart inflammation. Aurora said that was really scary, but also that they couldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Wyatt had to look up that expression. Aurora was probably the smartest girl he knew. Even though they couldn’t hang out as much, he was thankful for texting, which was how you really got to talk about whatever you wanted anyway.
A kid in Wyatt’s class, Jack, heard his own mom saying that Wyatt’s mom was off her meds, which he told Wyatt, so Wyatt shoved him to the ground on the soccer field. Then everyone heard his mom had gotten in Priscilla Clark’s face for making a remark about the bumper stickers on their car. Wyatt’s mom insisted she didn’t threaten Priscilla, at least not the way people said she did. Either way, fewer and fewer people came for haircuts and highlights from Wyatt’s mom after that.
“I think your mom might be bipolar, or something,” Aurora said. “And she’s definitely paranoid.”
Paranoid. This was after Wyatt described the cans of food they stocked, the extra batteries, his mother’s target practice at the shooting range, and the makeshift targets they’d made in the woods at his grandma’s house, where Wyatt got to practice shooting, too.
“What? Like you don’t believe something terrible will probably happen?” he asked. “It’s all school shootings and freak storms. My mom might be kind of, like,” he widened his eyes and pointed to his head with his finger, “But she’s not, you know, totally that.”
Aurora jumped a little when a locker slammed down the hall. “You have a point. Everything is kinda crazy,” she said.
“I could keep us safe, though, you know, if something did like, actually happen,” Wyatt said, trying to lean confidently by the water fountain. He watched Aurora smile at him, at the way her tongue poked out a little between her teeth like she was about to say something else.
“You’re sweet, Wyatt,” she said finally, and her voice sounded to him like swooping, generous handwriting. The kind that was legible on the board from the back of the classroom, with space to breathe between letters. S W E E T. Then she said: “I sure as shit don’t want to get stuck at my house if something goes down.”
Aurora lived farther from downtown than Wyatt did. Her family had a lot of acres and hired a crew to mow and trim every inch of them. At Wyatt’s house, they called their land “out back” or “the woods.” Nothing worth tending to.
Aurora said some of the things Wyatt’s mom warned him sheeple would say, except it seemed to him that Aurora did think for herself. She had to stay after class one day in science because she glared at Mr. Walker, and it lowkey scared him. She explained that she didn’t think he had graded their science projects fairly and wanted to make her opinion known. Would a sheeple do that?
***
At Panera, Wyatt got permission to order two cookies. His mom and grandma talked about SHTF—which they spelled out in that whispery way adults do when they swear in front of kids, as if Wyatt didn’t know the word “shit” at twelve, even if he didn’t know why it’d hit a fan. Aurora texted him a selfie of her painting her toenails. She was always taking pictures and videos and sending Snapchats back and forth with her sister. Wyatt felt happy to be included. In return, he sent her a photo of their new puppy, Pickup. When his mom brought the little guy home on a whim to cheer them up, she said they were a family of brunettes now: her, Wyatt, and Pickup. Wyatt’s dad had been blond and was now bald.
Aurora texted back:
“sooo cute, wish i could squeeze him”
“any time you want”
“ugh my dad sucks. So strict.”
“fr…come over later. who cares!”
“ok maybe”
Wyatt’s heart dropped to his crotch at the thought of Aurora coming over to squeeze anything in such proximity to him, but the swirling momentum of his mom and grandma cut the feeling short and rushed him out to the parking lot. They had a schedule to keep. On the drive to the grocery store, Wyatt’s mom smoked a cigarette with her left hand out the window, wearing aviators from her younger days. Wyatt thought she looked cool. He couldn’t help it.
***
Over the summer, when Wyatt’s dad still lived at the house, his parents threw one of their impromptu parties. Wyatt played video games unbothered for a couple of hours, but after a while, he got hungry and bored. He wandered into the kitchen as one of the neighbors emerged from the bathroom.
“Hey, Wyatt,” she said. She’d moved to the neighborhood recently. He was pretty positive her name was Rose or Rosie, but he wasn’t a hundred percent positive, so he simply said “hi” back.
“Can I help you get anything? You hungry?” she asked.
Wyatt shook his head. “Do you know where my Mom and Dad are?”
The woman looked at him with sad lines across her forehead. He didn’t like that. It made him feel embarrassed. It always did. Women like her blended into one in Wyatt’s mind. They all whispered and wore purple gauzy clothes, like from India, even though they were white as an egret as far as Wyatt could tell.
“Yeah,” she said, “they’re still out by the fire. Are you sure I can’t get you anything, sweetie?”
Wyatt shook his head again. Her “sweetie” made him feel claustrophobic, not like Aurora’s open “S W E E T.” He’d go find his dad. He wanted to tell him about his secret cave in Minecraft.
“No, thank you. I know how to make lots of stuff, like ramen.”
With that, he walked out into the long dark that came after a summer dusk. A little past the picnic table, Wyatt saw the silhouettes of his parents by the fire pit. His mother’s back was to the flame, and she stood with one foot out, rocking herself slightly from the hip. Her hands flew up and all around when she spoke, as though she had to toss the tail end of every sentence skyward. Wyatt’s dad stood to her side, arms crossed, feet planted. They looked like parents from a movie.
Rose or Rosie was standing by his parents now, too, next to Gail and Henry from the other side of the street. Gail and Henry smoked a lot of pot and liked to cook naked, Wyatt’s parents had told him. One night, he went to the window to see for himself. He wished he hadn’t.
“He’s so emotionally intelligent,” Rose or Rosie was saying, her eyes settling on Wyatt as he sidled toward the adults to hear. Why is this woman so obsessed with me, he wondered.
“Have you thought about putting him in an acting class or something?”
Wyatt smiled, thinking that seemed kind of gay, but he was interested in maybe doing a YouTube channel about Minecraft. Rose or Rosie probably didn’t know anything about that, but he liked that she thought he was funny or handsome or whatever.
“And put him around all those Hollywood perverts?” his mom replied.
“Well, no.” Rose or Rosie looked confused. “I meant more like the school play. That kind of thing. Age appropriate.”
“They’re there, too, Rosie,” Wyatt’s mother said, with a staccato wave.
That shut Rosie, not Rose, right up for about two seconds until she said, “Well, it’s getting pretty late. It’s after eleven. You probably want to get Wyatt to bed, and I should get going.”
“Wyatt’s fine. He can tell me when he’s ready for bed,” his mom said.
Wyatt’s dad nodded. “We have really great communication with him. Right, babe?”
“Yep,” Wyatt’s mom said. “The other day, I’d had one of those days where I’d scrolled too much, you know. I see what these assholes are doing. They take from us to fund wars, famine, torture, and bombs. I mean, children are dying. Here and there. It’s not like that’s new…I just, I don’t know, I was asleep before I started doing the research. Anyway, I could hardly get out of bed thinking about it, and I said to Wyatt, I said, ‘Things might get more dangerous soon.’ I told him not to be afraid to fight back. I made him say the three Rs: resilient, ready, reactive. And, do you know what this boy said?”
She paused and tousled Wyatt’s hair. He wanted to go back inside now, but he’d wait for her to finish her story because he knew that’s what she wanted. “He said, ‘Mom, you’re scaring me. This is more information than I need right now.’ Can you believe it? He can tell me what he needs and when I am too adult with him. That’s how I’m raising him. I don’t care what anyone says, if you’re having kids in this day and age and you’re not raising them as little freedom fighters, then don’t bother.”
Rosie said nothing. The beaded border of her skirt blinked in the firelight, like a bunch of little eyes. Wyatt’s dad cocked his head and kicked at the dirt. “You know, Rosie, I think you were right about it getting a bit late,” he said into the silence.
***
A couple of months after the party, Wyatt’s dad packed a bag and left.
“This is only for a little while,” he said, bending down to look his son in the eyes.
“But what about Mom and me?” Wyatt asked. His dad sucked in his cheeks.
“I love your mom, but being married to her right now is kind of like being on a boat,” he said, “and I need to get my feet under me. Does that make sense?”
It didn’t.
“You can call me anytime, ok? I’m not leaving you, bud. I love you.”
The thing was, after he said that, he put his bag over his broad shoulder and did leave. As Wyatt watched him go, he felt heat come over him, strong and wordless. A growing muscle in his arm tightened and recoiled, driving his fist forward into the wall near the front door. It didn’t even hurt, which pleased him, so this time with intention, he drew back again. Wyatt didn’t hear his mother come up behind him, but he felt her cool hand wrap around his wrist and hold it still.
“You think you can act out now that you’re the man of the house?” she asked.
He shook his head and buried his face in her sweater to cry. She started to cry too, and they held each other wet like that until his mom exhaled and took his chin in her hand.
“We’re going to be ok, you and me,” she said, with a mouth-only smile. “Your dad will come back, I think, but if he doesn’t…This is what I’ve been trying to teach you about. Everything can change in an instant. We can’t rely on other people.”
“I thought you meant, like, people outside our family,” Wyatt said, “not Dad. I thought families were supposed to stick together.”
“Things change, baby. And people change, too.”
“I don’t want everything to change, Mom.”
Wyatt thought about his parents out by the fire. His mom moved so fast and loud, always with a flame behind her. It made Wyatt proud to understand this fundamental thing about her, but it gave him a pit in his stomach, too.
His mother looked at him, then her eyes drifted away. “Baby?” she asked.
“Yeah?”
“I need you to go check on the generator for me.”
Wyatt wiped his cheek and headed out back. When his dad came home, he’d be proud ofWyatt holding down the fort.
***
When they got to Market Basket, Wyatt’s mom squished her cigarette butt onto the yellow line of the parking spot. “Ok, baby, grab the cart and let’s go. You got the list?”
“Got it, Mom.” Wyatt pulled the list out of the pocket of his jeans.
Dry Goods: Rice, pasta, black beans, canned corn, baking powder, electrolyte powder, pasta sauce.
Proteins: Canned tuna (x8), beef jerky, powdered milk, peanut butter, ghee.
Miscellaneous: First aid supplies (band-aids).
Dinner stuff: Salad mix, carrots, chicken thighs, paprika.
Check, check. They wheeled through the refrigerator aisle, and Wyatt stopped to gaze at all the perishable things he didn’t get to have very often. Single-serve strawberry-banana smoothies, yogurt with Oreo toppings, gallons of milk, and little balls of mozzarella swaddled in plastic. His mom prioritized the shelf-stable stuff more and more since losing clients at her salon. He missed all the yogurt flavors. He wanted to tear up his mother’s list, load the cart with things that would go bad, and eat them all with Aurora. He wanted the swollen, dairy stomachache of too much of a good thing, of no plan.
“Arthur!” His mother’s voice called from one aisle over. Wyatt rolled his eyes. This was her newest addition to errand day: using a decoy name for him so that no one could use his real one to tempt him into an unmarked van, or whatever. Wyatt walked in the opposite direction of her voice, toward the deli, to watch the men in white hats slice meat as thin as it would go. The smell of chicken from the rotisserie filled his mouth with spit. He stopped just short of the deli counter.
There, shouting distance from him, stood Wyatt’s dad, scanning the shiny, spinning chickens with his hand hovering just above the small of another woman’s back. Wyatt watched them select a bird. He couldn’t move or speak. Then, as if summoned, Wyatt’s grandma emerged at the far end of the hot bar. She caught Wyatt’s eye and put up her hand to say “stay put.”
His dad would have known they’d be here today, so he must have—at least in part—been checking up on them, on Wyatt, from a safe distance. Like visiting a goddamn petting zoo. Goddamn, goddamn. He pictured the big swear word spelled out in his mind, so that, for a second, he didn’t have to look at his goddamn dad.
His grandma took long, stiff-kneed strides toward the chickens to tap Wyatt’s dad on the shoulder. Wyatt couldn’t hear what they said, but their gestures went quickly from small finger-points to whole-hand sweeps. She pointed in Wyatt’s direction, and his dad whipped his head around and waved.
“Hey, bud,” he called. “Come on over here!”
Wyatt didn’t budge. His dad’s face tensed with comprehension, and he turned back to his mother-in-law to say one more thing. Then, they gave each other a small, one-armed hug, as if with clipped wings.
His grandma came to where he still stood, frozen.
“Let’s scoop up your mom and take her to the farthest checkout lane, bub,” she said. “We’re all set here.”
She nudged him away from his dad, into the next aisle. On his way down Wyatt extended his arms all the way to push against the shelved items. He wondered if his mom was still calling his decoy name. If she was, he couldn’t hear her anymore. A few packs of hot dog buns thudded to the vinyl floor in his wake. Then a few more.
***
Pickup kept grabbing Wyatt’s sneaker from the corner of his bedroom and gnawing on it as Wyatt flipped his phone around in his hand. Aurora’s latest text, which he got on their way home from the store, said her dad had a bad day at work and had been drinking and yelling a lot. She hadn’t posted anything in hours, which Wyatt checked from a secret account his mom didn’t know about. Pickup, impatient, dropped the sneaker and started going at Wyatt’s calf with his needle puppy teeth. Wyatt stomped his foot hard, and Pickup scampered across the hall to his mom’s room. Wyatt, feeling guilty, went after him.
His mom’s clothes lay strewn around. Her weed pen sat on the dresser. Her flashlight charged on the floor by an empty, stale air freshener. Like a bomb went off, his grandma would say. That’s why his mom liked to meet Grandma at places like Panera. Neutral ground, she called it. The arms of a worn flannel hugged the armchair in the corner. It was one of his dad’s. He knew his mom was still falling asleep in it.
“u ok??!!” Wyatt triple-texted Aurora, pacing back and forth. Downstairs, he heard his mom organizing the cabinets and banging around in the kitchen. A man’s voice droned through her computer speakers. Finally, Aurora responded:
“i’m ok but need to get out of here. dad smashed a glass on the floor. we were all barefoot?!”
He thought of his mom’s flamingo shot glass, the bob and weave of drunk adults by firelight, his dad’s packed duffel bag, and Aurora’s small foot covered in blood. Wyatt felt a burning rise in his chest. Another text from Aurora: “biking to yours.” It would take her at least thirty minutes to get here. He had just enough time to get ready for her.
***
Wyatt greeted Aurora at the door, freshly showered with some beef jerky in hand. She was wearing a small backpack and a blue sweater. He didn’t invite her in, but stepped onto the patio instead with Pickup, who was ecstatic about the newcomer. Aurora dropped to her knees, her face all over the puppy’s. Wyatt laughed and waved for both of them to follow him to the backyard, beyond the fire pit, past a long-forgotten birdfeeder.
“You wanted to show me your creepy shed?” Aurora asked. “Like, is this the part where I get murdered?”
Wyatt made a little gesture to tip his imaginary hat. “Welcome to Bunker Lane.”
“To…did you say Bunker?”
“Ohhh yeah.”
Wyatt took Aurora by the hand, and the warmth of her palm surprised him. He led her into the little structure. Inside were two sets of bunk beds, a bookshelf with its hodgepodge of books and games, a small kitchen, and rows and rows of canned goods covering the walls like tiles.
“This is totally insane,” she said, spinning around in a circle to take in the little home. “Why didn’t you tell me about this?! It’s cool. Your mom really is nuts. But it’s cool.”
“My dad actually built it,” Wyatt said. “To make my mom happy, I think. Or to try.”
“It really is unbelievable. Can I…?” Aurora took out her phone to scan around. Wyatt nodded, moving to stand beside her so she had a clear view and he could be close. She smelled like leaves and sun-baked dirt from her bike ride.
“How long could you stay here?”
“As long as we want.”
“No, seriously.”
“They can’t make us leave if we don’t want to,” Wyatt said, unshouldering his half-zipped backpack. Aurora’s eyes widened.
“Like camping,” she said, “except without my dad getting wasted roasting marshmallows. I’m down.”
Wyatt wasn’t sure they meant the same thing. “No one comes in unless we say so, and we don’t leave until we say so,” he said. “There’s gotta be rules, Aurora.”
“What kind of rules?”
“Like, your dad can’t yell at you and throw stuff. Like, my mom needs to pull it together, and my dad can’t bring his chicken-lips girlfriend in here.” Wyatt wiped a little excited spit from his chin. “They’re all stressed about when ‘shit hits the fan,’ but it already has!” Wyatt slammed his fist into his open hand for emphasis. His palm stung from impact.
Doubt darkened Aurora’s eyes, a shadow Wyatt could imagine on his own face when his mom got too intense. He backed off a little.
Into the quiet, Aurora said, “I guess I think we have to survive where we are. I don’t think you can just drop out of it all.” Another beat of silence.
“Do you want to play one of the games?” Wyatt asked.
“A game sounds good.”
He walked over to one of the shelves and panicked a bit when he only saw Parcheesi and Checkers nestled between field manuals on wild foraging. He’d never thought about boredom during the apocalypse.
By the time they got tired of Checkers, Aurora seemed comfortable again. She’d kicked off her shoes and leaned toward Wyatt across the checkerboard, cross-legged on the lower bunk bed. There was a hole in her sock, he noticed, and her blue-painted toenail stuck out like a ripe blueberry. He had the humiliating urge to kiss it, to bite it a little.
“You seriously have the prettiest eyelashes. I’m so jealous,” Aurora said. Wyatt blushed. Grown women often told him this, and it made him consider taking a pair of nail scissors to the things. What use did a boy have for something so pretty? Coming from Aurora, it felt different. She deserved pretty things.
“Thanks,” he said. “I think your hair looks really cool braided like that.” They both smiled, and Wyatt fumbled as he put his Checkers pieces back in the box. Aurora arched her back and cracked her neck. Wyatt tried to read her movements. Was she bored? Did she want to leave? For the first time he could remember, he didn’t feel like he was waiting for something bad to happen.
“I don’t want to go back home to my dad,” Aurora said. “Show me what else you have in here?”
Wyatt let out a sigh of relief, and he didn’t care how obvious it sounded. He shot up from the bed.
“Ok, this is the real prepper stuff,” he said. He brought out the siphoning pump and showed her how it worked. He let her press buttons on the satellite phone, and she made a pretend call in a bad British accent. “Shaken, not stirred,” they said to each other, giggling hysterically, as though they’d ever seen a martini in their lives. With each object, Aurora crouched to get a better angle for a video. Wyatt wanted to put on a show for her, to be worth documenting. He stood up and dusted himself off.
“Drumroll, please,” he said. Aurora tapped her thigh with her free hand, her phone in the other, pointed at Wyatt. He threw open his father’s finest piece of woodworking: the unassuming gun chest that had been at the foot of the bed the whole time, like where his grandma might keep her quilts, fully stocked for end times.
“You’re joking,” Aurora said. “They let you open that?”
Wyatt shrugged, admiring the row of matte black gun barrels. “I know what I’m doing,” he said. “And there are no secrets in this house.”
“That’s so free,” Aurora said. “I wish this were real life.” Wyatt pulled out some freeze-dried snacks to cheer her up, to show her it was real if they wanted. Time didn’t pass the same in a place built for when everything burned, so he didn’t know how long it had been. Then the knock came heavy at the door.
***
When the police officer’s voice boomed low from outside, Wyatt closed his eyes against the intrusion. He saw his mother’s empty salon chair, pink and glowing from the sun sitting in it. He saw his dad’s back, strong and hunched and receding. He saw the cans of beans lift their own lids and say: “resilient, ready, reactive.” His feet went pins and needles and pressure formed in his eyes, making his jaw clench and throb.
Then Aurora screamed his name. He’d never heard her scream.
Wyatt’s hands were on the gun chest, no, on a gun. He wanted to explain to her how dangerous it was outside, that he knew what he was doing. But he didn’t know what he was doing. He didn’t have a plan for this. Fuck. Why didn’t he have a plan for this? Aurora’s gaze held him steady.
“Wyatt, no,” she said in a near-whisper. “You’ll make everything worse.”
Wyatt lifted his hands, bent his arms at the elbows, held them there for her to see. As he stood like that, his vision cleared and he saw that Aurora’s whole body was trembling.
***
Wyatt came out of the bunker with his hands up, as instructed, only after the cops let his dad do their secret knock to let him know it was ok, that they had to come out, that this was all over. There were Gail and Henry in the driveway, looking hastily dressed, and Aurora’s dad pacing, barking at the nearest police officer. Rosie spoke to a bored-looking news reporter on the patio. Behind her, a tequila bottle sat full of old rain. And there was his mom, sobbing and yelling at Aurora’s dad, at the cops, at anyone, restrained by his grandmother, who held her daughter in her strong, sun-spotted arms until she buckled at the knees. A pace behind him, Wyatt heard Aurora’s voice saying over and over again that they just wanted to be left alone for a little while, that they weren’t going to do anything, it was just a Snapchat meant for her sister, not for her dad to call in the cavalry, there was no reason to get all paranoid.
Wyatt’s dad ran to him, holding Pickup in one arm and drawing Wyatt to his chest with the other. “It’s ok now. You’re ok,” he said. From where she stood, his mom yelled, “He’s not ok!” Pickup whined. Wyatt craned his neck away from his dad, pulling puppy fur from his mouth. He closed his eyes. The slow beacon of the siren still glowed in the darkness, red and blue and red and blue and red, until, when he felt ready, he blinked directly into the light.
Kate Cavanaugh is a writer from New Hampshire who lives in New York. Her writing has appeared in Hobart, Voicemail Poems, Angel Food, and elsewhere.
Abbie Doll is an artist based in Columbus, OH with an MFA from Lindenwood University. Her photography has been featured in places such as 3:AM Magazine, PRISM international, and Gone Lawn. She also serves as a Fiction Editor at Identity Theory. Connect on socials @AbbieDollWrites.